I spent Monday and Tuesday this week at our annual Clergy Conference. Along with time to catch up with old colleagues in ministry and participate in important conversations with diocesan leaders, every year’s Clergy Conference includes a series of presentations by a guest speaker. Sometimes these are great. Sometimes they’re just fine. This year, I was really blown away.

Our speaker this year with Debie Thomas, an Episcopal layperson who serves as Minister for Lifelong Formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto. Debie was raised in the United States by Indian immigrant parents, who came from the southern Indian state of Kerala, where they were members of the community of Mar Thoma Christians, who date their history back two thousand years to the ministry of Saint Thomas in India. Her father was an evangelical pastor in the US. Debie herself is a writer and a mother, “a seeker, an explorer, a believer, and a doubter,” as she puts it.

Her presentations grappled with each of the readings appointed to Pentecost, asking how each one might point us to a way in which the Holy Spirit is leading the Church today. What are the “dry bones” in our lives and in our churches, the things that seem dead and gone that only God can restore to life? How does the Holy Spirit translate the language of our faith into the language of our own lives, so that we hear God speaking to each one of us in a way we can understand, as the disciples heard at Pentecost? How does the Spirit pray for us, when we do not know how to pray for ourselves, with “sighs too deep for words,” as Paul says? What is the truth toward which Jesus is leading us in this “post-truth” age?

It was a week of many questions, and few answers. But luckily, Pentecost is still a few weeks away. I wonder, between now and then, whether you might pick one of those questions, and explore it in your prayer between now and then.